Articles on ASP.NET

The .NET Framework contains several hundreds of classes, yet
something is missing: there is no class for compressing and
decompressing Zip archives. This omission however can be made up for
by using the .NET Zip Library (NZipLib) - it supports Zip as well as
GZip format, is free, and comes with C# source code included.

A frequent problem in uploading image files is that the size (width, height) isn't known and
that consequently you have to determine them on your own.
With help from the .NET Framework, everybody can program his own ImageInfo component
without this project turning into an inordinate effort - you just have to use the Bitmap
class to your advantage. And presto - we have size information for 12 image file formats!

There are (almost) as many email components as there are grains of sand on a beach, and many of them even are free.
Certainly (almost) everyone has used them, be it AspMail, CDONTS, SA-SmtpMail or
one of many others. Something that (almost) no one has done up to now is programming his or her own
email component. In today's article we will concern ourselves with the basics and send a very simple
email message. In future articles we will build on the source code presented today and will
finally have a fully functional component for HTML emails and attachments.

Something found on every web page today is an email form. In all probability this will not
change anytime soon, therefore I will demonstrate today how to send email via ASP.NET: from plain to
HTML mail and attachments.

Something that could not reasonably be done under ASP without a third party
component was the uploading of files to the web server even though the uses of this
feature range from content management systems to online cost estimates for
translations (based on the content of uploaded files).

From the 'Good Old Times' of ASP programming, many should remember the FileSystemObject object.
It allows access to the file system for reading, writing and directory
browsing. However, the object model is anything but perfect, and
there are some other functions and properties which I would have liked to have.
It looks as if these wishes would be fulfilled by the .NET Framework classes in
the System.IO namespace. File processing was never easier and above all never
more powerful.

Under Windows 2000 (or NT) the Event Log is about the most important source of
information for the administrator because all events that occurred are logged
there - from success to catastrophical failure. And as it is so important, what
would be more obvious than to make it accessible via the web?

Quite often you want to know who owns a given domain. To obtain the registry information,
you go to the respective registry (DENIC, Network Solutions etc.) and start a so called
WHOIS query (lookup). The trick is that you have to know which registry is responsible for
for which TLD (Top Level Domain). Even if you had all the TLD/registry information - you'll
never remember the URLs of the query pages. There is no uniform one - yet! In today's article
such a page is just what we will code.

In today's article I will show you how easy it is in ASP.NET to read performance counters - using the
System.Diagnostics Namespace of the .NET framework. You don't need external components like in ASP,
but get even more functionality instead. You can even reconstruct parts of the NT performance
monitor without spending too much time on it.

Something that cannot be done in ASP without support by an external component is dynamic creation of
graphics - be it a diagram, a banner or just a simple graphical counter. This fortunately has changed
for ASP.NET - using built-in means, graphics can be created dynamically and sent to the client with a
maximum of configurability and ease.